Become The Expert In Your Niche – Show#6

What is the most limiting resource in your universe? Your time…

If you are ever going to be successful (in whatever measure you use for success) you need to be able to leverage this – the most valuable resource. I’m not going to talk today about outsourcing, delegating, goal setting or prioritizing your daily activities – although these are all very important – instead, I want to talk about focus. Taking one area of your life or business, narrow it down to the smallest niche and become an expert at it.

We’ve all seen people who meander about in life from one project to another – one job to another – or maybe even one wife and family to another. They never really figure out how to be really great at anything. In so doing, they never really fulfill any of their personal, social, spiritual or financial goals or fine tune the skills necessary to reach those goals.

By contrast, you often see athletes, community or business leaders who are laser targeted on becoming the absolute best at one thing and after they achieve that are also able to move that focus into other areas of their life and realize success there also. The reason this works is because our minds have an incredible capacity to expand and take the disciplines learned in becoming great in one area and transfer that into other areas of life. It also works because the confidence and sense of achievement built by success in one area is immediately transferable to other areas in our life.

You can’t be all things to all people – you can’t even be all things to one person. Instead of trying, just stop completely (maybe for five minutes?) and drill down to one thing or area that you can become an expert.

Let’s start with a personal area – say you want to be a better spouse. You can try the haphazard approach of a card or flowers every now and then along with a word of appreciation from time to time when you think about it – or – knowing that everyone has a basic human need to feel appreciated you can decide that every single day you are going to find a new way to show your spouse how much you appreciate them. Just the creative process itself to figure this out will expand your mind in ways that will stave off Alzheimers for another 50 years.

For a business example – there’s no use trying to be another Wal-Mart. You can’t beat them on selection or price. Instead, pick a niche (cooking is hot right now). There are a million items in the cooking niche so drill down to a single item – kitchen knives. Learn everything you can about balance, handles, types of steel, blade angles, safety, etc. Publish articles, write a newspaper column, start a blog, write a book – anything to get your name out there and be the one person that if someone wants to know about knives they know your name. Either sell the perfect knives or become an affiliate and make a referral commission on every customer you send to the perfect knife manufacturer. Once you own one area start to expand into complementary products (sharpeners, cutting boards, etc.) Customers already trust your opinion, know you’re the expert and will follow you with credit card in hand.